Presence - Visual Tools for Focus - A Retrospective

Hi, I’m Chad Moore. You’re receiving this email as you signed up for my Newsletter, called Presence. I appreciate you being here and reading! I’d love to hear from you, send a reply if you want to chat. If you’d no longer like to receive these emails, unsubscribe here.

Throughout this series, I’ve asked if you’ve given any of the tools a try, and to see if they’ve worked for you. I thought I’d add a Visual Tool for Reflection here at the end of the series. 

I hope you’ve enjoyed the series, and I appreciate you reading. 

I’ll likely be taking a break over the month of December, so this email list may be quiet for a while. I’m thinking of other topics that might be helpful. If you have any feedback on that, I’d be happy to hear it!

Many development teams run retrospectives at the end of a project or a preset Sprint of work. The idea is to reflect on the how. Not what the team produced, but how they did the work over the last cycle. 

The classic format is to list items to Continue doing, to Start doing, and to Stop doing. Then prioritize the answers and bring at least one into the next Sprint. 

This is typically a visual process. Whiteboards, real or digital are often used. That Start, Stop, Continue format might work for you, although you could make it a bit more fun…

There’s a ton of different Retrospective formats, I’ll suggest the Sailboat Rertro as an example. 

The drawing has the following ideas:

Wind - What moved you forward?

Rock - What were the obstacles you faced?

Anchor - What caused you drag, what slowed you down?

Island - What did you learn?

Sun - What were your goals?

The boat - Who was on your team? Who are you?

Draw this on a whiteboard, write, place and move stickies around. Or, draw and redraw as you iterate on whatever paper you have. Again, these exercises are meant to be fast and furious. Write first, think second. 

Go go go!

Once you answer all six prompts, give yourself some time to think though and actions you may want to take. If you wind up with a lot of things to try, use the Value vs. Effort or Eisenhower Matrix to think through them. 

These tools can be combined in ways that work for your process!

Again, I hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and I’d love to write another bunch of articles based on what’s important to you.

Let me know by replying to this email.

Stay safe, have fun, and go make something.